


A Foot for Every Year

by epanistamai



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M, Flashbacks Galore, Gen, M/M, every female character is underserved, fast and loose with canon, romance will be slow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-07-29 20:54:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7698991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epanistamai/pseuds/epanistamai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her scientists spoke of the Theory as her grandfather spoke of god, of all things clean and unclean.  All things perfect and imperfect, unable to understand that truth could only be a multitude. Maybe she was naive, but then again, she always thought herself smarter than Howard where it mattered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Foot for Every Year

_James_

   When he's in a good mood, he'll watch the flies in Hataka House do their crazed dance on the window sill and he'll let himself think. He'll let his mind trace the perfection of his history, the process that lead to him as he is, eating noodles on a Tuesday in the East Side in a New York that has changed as much as him.

   He hears that men have walked on the moon, that satellites have been launched that will reach the edges of the galaxy but here on Earth, he'll still be holding his dagger and gun, a body at his feet.

 

_Bruce_

   No one ever believes him when he says he grew up in Alabama. Talladega to be precise, a clarification that always gets obnoxious Will Ferrell impressions from whoever he's talking to. It's not that they don't believe he's from there since his accent proves it, it's that no one really connects Alabama and cutting-edge nuclear physics. Yet here is is.

   The house is still standing, a testament to a uniquely Southern apathy, the paint peeling and windows resolutely uncracked. Bruce assumes it’s because the place is too backroads to vandalize. Not that he grew up in the middle of a forest or anything. Simply that vandalism didn’t really cross anyone’s mind, in the town or outskirts where his house is situated. He thinks about that one scene in Forrest Gump, where the love interest, her name escapes him, attacks her house. All the rage from an incomplete childhood coalesced into an orgy of screams and physical blows. He wants to reach for that same rage within him, that same righteous fury of _that was my childhood you ruined daddy, my only fucking childhood goddamnit_ but it doesn’t come up. The most he can come up with is a vague sense of regret that it all ended like this. He thinks of the white-haired preacher, of how anger was not from this world, was of the devil and to the devil should remain.

_God_ , even thinking about home made him maudlin. He pushes his way into the house, the front door listing to the side from its rusted over top hinges. The whole house smells like earth, like decomposition. The vinyl and wood board floor is now coated with a fine layer of earth, sprouting small weeds and the like. Most of the appliances are still where he remembers them, also coated with a fine layer of dust and dirt, rusted and beyond saving. He focuses his mind on cataloging what remained the same, what changed. The dent near his parents’ bedroom, where his father had thrown the clock at his mother, the back end of the hallway where he and Jennifer had sat and played as children, the Sharpie-black marks where his mother noted his height, the hole in his door from when his father tried to kick the whole thing in, the peeled up piece of floor in the kitchen where Bruce had hidden the pipes and illicit napalm – all the sounds of his childhood converging into him.

He closes his eyes. Breathes.

 

   Five hours later, he’s in a secure Boeing jet, flying to Tucson, Arizona for the Lab. He’s reviewing his notes while a severe, bearded military man watches him. He’s doing his best to ignore the way his skin crawls at the gaze, to submerge himself in the papers and in his work. The paper he’s supposed to be proofreading is about a gamma bomb they’re set to test in a week. He's aware that they don't really need his explicit sign-off. It’s just that they want to cover their asses and getting a nuclear physicist (that they've been grooming since sixteen) to give a vague approval will satisfy their paperwork side. It's an act they've been puling for longer than Bruce has been working for them. All in all, he can't bring him to care about this indignity. He gets to do high-level experiments with cutting edge technology and all he has to do in return is pretend he cares about the minutiae of bureaucracy, America's to be precise.

 

 

_Maria_

   They wanted me to divide my life into two perfect halves: “Before Howard” and “After Howard”, the raucous confection that was our wedding serving as the boundary between the two.

Do you all think of me like this?

   Did you know that once, when I was fifteen, I saw my father cheat on my mother? Every detail of that day was preserved in my mind, to be accessed whenever I wanted to feel something soft and thoughtful for my mother. I woke up at seven that day, an hour early, because I wanted to rehearse a little more on the piano. My recital was coming up and I still remembered my instructor’s constricted, drawn face from the last recital, when I had stumbled over a Brahms piece. I wore a simple dressing gown, opaque enough to be suitable, and took some coffee and fruit in my study before leaving for the Cormac Room, where my piano was.

   You must also know that the Cormac Room was in the North Wing of our mansion, decently far from my bedroom and study, both of which were more in the South Wing. I had to pass my parent’s bedroom and my father’s study before reaching the Cormac Room. That morning, as I passed my parent’s bedroom, the door was open, showing me only my mother still curled up in bed, sheets almost sliding off the bed. She would leave in about an hour since she always took early tea with one of her friends, on Wednesdays. My father was in his study, humming something as he flipped through a book. His breakfast sat on a side table, ignored. I practiced for almost four hours, playing nothing but Brahms opus 116, Liszt La Campanella, and Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu. A perfect set, one that would win me the competition if I played it flawlessly. I know you can feel the tension build up, an innocent fifteen year old girl playing her little tunes while her father did incomprehensible things in his office, his private castle that not even his wife entered. You’ll be happy, then, to note that I made almost no mistakes in my practice that day. I was happy, not joyful mind you, but happy enough that I decided to take lunch in my study so that I could read for the afternoon. I rang the servants to send up lunch, put up my sheet music, and headed back to my room.

   I passed by my father’s study, where the door was still open, only a crack. Open enough for me to hear the sounds coming out of it, always the sounds first. Maybe his mistress was careless when she came up. I can’t imagine my father forgetting this detail. Like I can’t forget how my father’s back looked, jerking back and forth between the splayed legs of some woman I vaguely recognized from one social event or another. Her grunts and moans, breathy and high-pitched, his noises almost silent, as though through not being heard his transgression would go unnoticed. My first thought wasn’t for my mother but for the breakfast he’d left cooling this morning. Did he already finish it? Would he have a servant bring up fresh lunch for him and mistress? Owing to his work, our servants had to be discreet to the point of silent invisibility. They wouldn’t speak of my father’s business deals. My mother would never hear of this. I didn’t eat lunch or dinner that day.

   Maybe I should have divided my life into this. Before and after I promised myself that any husband of mine would never do this to me. Imagine that. I thought of my own future, amorphous marriage before my mother’s marriage, in terrible carnal display before me. Is that too forward of a memory? Think of it as a story, if you must, then. The first of many from me. After all, I have nowhere in particular to go. Haven’t for a long time.


End file.
